Online Video Ad Network DBG Acquires Digital Sports Ventures

Digital Broadcasting Group, one of the biggest producers and distributors of branded web video content, today announced that it has acquired Digital Sports Ventures, a multimedia content platform that delivers college sports video, like highlights, plays of the week, conference recaps, draft previews, and other premium content to websites across the country.

This is Digital Broadcasting Group’s first acquisition, and marks a important step in the company’s move to create and distribute original video programming in niche verticals across the Web. As Digital Sports Ventures is an official syndicator of Division I college sports video across the Big 12, Pac-10, Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Mountain West and Conference USA, this allows its new owner to leverage this original sports video content against its own stable of over 2,600 publishers.

DBG has, in the past, created original branded programming for brands like Infiniti, Hewlett Packard, Ford, Spring, Coca-Cola and more, and has recently become one of the top 5 largest video ad networks, according to comScore, drawing over 107 million monthly active visitors to the pre-roll inventory it distributes from its advertisers as well as its original programming.

The acquisition was led in part by DBG Chief Product Officer Matthew Corbin who was formerly Global VP of Platform Solutions at Tremor Media and Head of Global Strategic Partnerships at Google/YouTube. Corbin also played a leading role in developing CLiP, DBG’s Content Library Platform which launched this August. As a content syndication solution, CLiP is designed to give publishers access to the company’s content library as well as a customizable video player and suite of management tools, including hosting and support, enabling them to significantly boost the video ad inventory on their sites.

By integrating Digital Sports Ventures’ portfolio of publishers, which includes McClatchy, The
Seattle Times, and The Detroit News, as well as its content management system and customizable
video players, CLiP will now be able to get its paws on that much-coveted niche: premium sports content. As the company says that it expects to stream 100 million videos monthly across nearly 300 websites, reaching approximately 10 million consumers each month, this will surely be of interest to the big athletic (and complementary consumer) brands that advertise to this sizable demographic.

“The introduction of DBG CLiP marked the first step towards alleviating the drought of premium content available for publishers to bring to viewers”, said DBG CEO Chris Young in a statement. “Adding Digital Sports Ventures and its syndication capabilities to our already existing stable of premium content, DBG can provide a more complete offering that serves the needs of publishers of all sizes in a growing number of verticals”.